Erast Fandorin
Erast Petrovich Fandorin (Russian: Эраст Петрович Фандорин) is a fictional 19th-century Russian detective and the hero of a series of Russian historical detective novels by Boris Akunin.
| Erast Petrovich Fandorin | |
|---|---|
Oleg Menshikov as Erast Fandorin in the 2005 movie The State Counsellor | |
| First appearance | The Winter Queen |
| Last appearance | The Pit |
| Created by | Boris Akunin |
| Portrayed by | Oleg Menshikov Egor Beroev Ilya Noskov Simon Robson Piotr Zurawski |
| In-universe information | |
| Alias | Erast Petrovich Nameless ("He Lover of Death"), Genji ("She Lover of Death"), Erast Petrovich Kuznetsov ("Before the End of the World") |
| Nickname | Funduk (schoolmates); Erasmus (Count Zurov) |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | April–May 1876: Moscow police clerk May–September 1876, July 1877-March 1878: Agent of the Third Section September 1876-July 1877: Volunteer in the Serbian Army 1878-1882: Diplomat 1882-1891: Deputy for Special Assignments under the Governor-general of Moscow 1891-1904: private investigator, engineer and adventurer 1904-1905: Consulting engineer for the Railroad Police Department. |
| Spouse | Yelizaveta "Lizanka" von Evert-Kolokoltseva (1876), Eliza Altairskaya-Lointaine (1911-1914), Yelizaveta Anatolievna "Mona" Turusova (married 1919) |
| Children | "Captain Vasily Rybnikov" (son, 1879-1905), Alexander Fandorine (son), born 1920 |
The first Fandorin novel (The Winter Queen, Russian: Азазель) was published in Russia in 1998, and the latest and the last one in 2023 (The Pit, Russian: Яма). More than 15 million copies of Fandorin novels have been sold as of May 2006, even though the novels were freely available from many Russian websites and the hard copies were relatively expensive by Russian standards. New books in the Fandorin series typically sell over 200,000 copies in the first week alone, with an unparalleled (for mystery novels) first edition of 50,000 copies for the first books to 500,000 copies for the last.
The English translations of the novels have been critically acclaimed by, among others, Ruth Rendell.